


Tarjamāt

by febricant



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Historical context, Loss, M/M, Other, Sexuality, Translation, crisis of faith(s), immortals are really fucking weird
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:02:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25696240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/febricant/pseuds/febricant
Summary: A letter with the beginning torn off, or: how to be immortal
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Quynh | Noriko, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 75
Kudos: 424





	Tarjamāt

**Author's Note:**

> Endless thanks to [lembeau](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lembeau/pseuds/lembeau) for the very necessary sensitivity read, the beta, the encouragement and the patience required to deal with my massive eruption of feelings. Thanks for the latter also from [door](https://door.tumblr.com) and L, as well.

1.

2019

Nile saw Joe praying very early one morning in Tangier, kneeling with his eyes closed, an open window nearby casting a blade of light across him. The call to prayer was long gone outside, but the peace of being up very early was still lingering, air heavy with dust and salt and nobody else awake yet.

Nile’s mother had raised a person who had never liked people who didn’t mind their own damn business, so she turned around and left him to it, finding herself in the tiny, slanted kitchen of their safehouse with nothing to do with her hands.

She hadn’t taken off her crucifix, but she’d thought maybe at some point someone would make her.

It wasn’t a thought that made sense. None of them had made her do anything. They’d issued no edicts, made no demands, had asked for no payment. She was just one of them, now, a strange, dizzy thought which wouldn’t quite take hold and stay. The most they’d offer was advice, and experience, and warnings.

Since they’d left London, they had been to Rome, and then driven what seemed like the length of Southern Europe in a car too tiny to fit them all, crammed themselves into the cargo hold of a ship they hadn’t told anyone they were getting on, and snuck out in Tangier, and now here they were, in a white city, crammed into a two-bedroom apartment with blue painted shutters and a pristine layer of dust over everything but perfectly functional gas and electricity.

She’d left Andy asleep in the bedroom they’d been sharing, facedown and sprawled on the mattress which was a little too short for her, her axe handle sticking out from under the frame in easy reach.

It was a new world. Nile wiped some dust off the counter and started looking for something which looked like a coffee pot.

“Here,” Nicky said, startling her badly when he reached over her and took down a little pot like she’d seen people using in Afghanistan, kind of, though much less battered. She hadn’t even heard him come in. “Andy will drink anything you put in front of her, but we prefer good coffee.”

 _We._ Always _we_ , with Nicky and Joe. “You might have to show me.” Nile fought the urge to whisper. “I can’t get over drinking the grounds.”

Nicky looked deeply pained, but his expressions were still guesswork for Nile, who thought sometimes that he looked like he was dreaming while he was wide awake. She’d seen people start to take on a bit of a stare in the Marines, and all the talk about PTSD and how it was nothing to be ashamed of had always stuck her as sort of malicious after the fact, like it was expected that shame would follow them anyway. Nicky didn’t look like that, exactly. He had a sleepy, gentle affect which did nothing to prevent the crackle of nerves she got along the back of her neck when he was close, sometimes, and she couldn’t tell if it was because she knew he was ancient or because he did.

“I am sorry for your experiences with the world’s finest drink,” Nicky said, lighting the gas with a match like a camping stove and beckoning Nile closer so she could watch the coffee percolate thickly in the water. “When it starts to come up like that, see? You can smell it.” He took it off more quickly than she thought, and put it down to settle. “Now, small cups. Lots of sugar, if you want, but I don’t like it.”

Nile sat down at the table with him, and he opened the folding windows to let the air in, maybe, or just show her their view of a long, narrow street, strung with hanging laundry and banners she couldn’t read yet. The white paint was peeling off the walls, and some of the paving stones were cracked, but it was one of the most beautiful places Nile had ever been, and she said so.

“It is,” Nicky agreed, holding his coffee in the tips of his long fingers before he tilted his head, listening to something Nile couldn’t hear, and poured coffee into the third cup, just in time for Joe to appear in the doorway too.

Joe kissed the top of Nicky’s head and took it, sitting down next to him.

“Nile was just telling me how beautiful it is here.” Nicky said, beginning to look more awake.

“Mm. Yes. It’s changed a lot, but it is.”

God, everything around them must have changed so much it was actually-- well. Terrifying. “What was it like last time you were here?”

“Was it the eighties?” Joe asked Nicky, taking his hand, lacing their fingers together. “I’ve forgotten.”

“The seventies, I think?”

“Seventy-three,” Andy said, slouching in the doorway with a massive yawn. “Any left for me?”

“Help yourself,” Joe said, well-worn, as though he’d said it thousands of times. “It’s fresh, I bought it yesterday.”

Andy finished the pot. Exactly four cups, Nile thought. Seemed like they couldn’t gain someone without losing someone, either. Suddenly, the rich, thick coffee tasted less amazing.

-

Nile had the nightmare again on their second night in Tangier, when the sound of the sea against the hull of the boat they’d stowed away on had faded and she felt like she was on solid ground.

She woke up drowning, and found Andy staring at her. Her eyes were bright in the early-morning gloom, watching Nile carefully, as though signs of Quynh’s whereabouts might manifest on Nile’s face by magic.

Andy blinked, and the sensation was gone. “Joe’s probably up,” she offered, when Nile couldn’t think of anything to say.

Sometimes Nile thought she might have understood how Booker had felt, and why Andy had let him wallow in it. Quynh had been someone to Andy, yes, but somehow, maybe having someone around who still dreamed of her made the weight of a broken promise lighter.

Nile got out of bed.

Joe was in the small parlour again, kneeling on the same mat on the same clean-swept floor between the outdated TV and the plastered wall, letting the first fingers of morning sun brush over him at an angle.

The sounds for the call to prayer slowly died off, but Joe stayed kneeling for a few minutes more, speaking quietly, pitch low and even. It was when he stood up, settled his feet and shoulders, and brought his hands to his ears to begin his prayer that Nile felt voyeuristic, watching his quiet moment instead of taking her own.

She turned to go as he was finishing, kneeling and turning his head as he murmured the last of the prayers. Nile thought she ought to try and recreate Nicky’s coffee technique as a sort of peace offering, but Joe glanced at her and smiled before she managed to tear herself away, and Nile didn’t quite know how to leave, now that he’d acknowledged her.

“Sorry if I interrupted you,” she said, meaning it deeply.

“It’s hard to keep space when there’s not much room,” Joe pointed out. “We are used to sharing.”

Of course, everything they had they had in common, but this place had signs of Joe and Nicky all over it, no matter how infrequently they occupied it. The TV, for one, Andy wouldn’t have cared about, but Joe liked sports and game shows and inexplicably terrible movies, and Nicky’s sword had a mount by the door, ready for hands at any moment. We.

“You’re up early, Nile,” Joe prompted.

“I had the nightmare again. Or-- the dream. Quynh’s dream.”

Joe stood up and put the prayer mat away carefully, then came over to enfold her in a hug so fierce she was taken wholly by surprise. “It will happen again,” he said. “I’m sorry. Booker had it sometimes, too. Poor, stupid bastard.” He clapped her gently on the shoulder as he pulled back, the weight of his hand already becoming weirdly familiar. They all touched each other, all the time, without even seeming to notice. “Come, I’ll make coffee.”

“You’re obsessed,” Nile muttered, but she did feel better, and she was relieved to have at least one less thing to worry about; Joe would make it perfectly.

“It’s not obsession, it’s love.”

He put coffee in front of her some time later, and Nile did her best to perk up, but she still had a salt-taste in her mouth, and the feeling of pressure on her chest, as though she were being crushed by an inescapable force.

She found herself touching her crucifix, a nervous habit she had never even tried to shake. Maybe Andy was right and there was no God, but damned if Nile was ready to think about it.

“I remember when it was new, too.” Joe poured himself a second cup, depriving whoever got up last of theirs. “I remember when I discovered we had been given this gift at the same time, Nicky and I. I was furious.”

“Really? You two seem so--”

“So?”

“United, I guess?”

Joe looked at her, and something in Nile wanted to show him her insides, how she’d meant it to come out, because Joe showed his age the least of them, was always ready with a joke or a quip or a moment of commiseration, but-- she had walked in on his prayers, and he had given her his time, and she still couldn’t tell what it meant when he just stared, taking her words and digesting them. “We couldn’t have been more opposed, at the time, Nile. Time heals as well as hurts. It’s not predictable the way people who aren't like us think it is. Like your dreams of Quynh. We don’t know where she is but if you’re dreaming of her then she’s somewhere, and so there is hope. I’m not saying you should be happy about it. Booker used to get them too.”

“You think there’s any point in praying it’ll go away?”

Joe shrugged, leaning away from her, and Nile felt she’d transgressed somehow, touched on something forbidden. “That seems like a terrible use of your prayers. If you’re not going to drink that, I will.”

“Sorry, here.” She handed it over. “When Andy and I met she told me God didn’t exist, and that she was worshipped like one once.”

Joe smiled into his beard, taking Nile’s offering. “I had already come to that conclusion myself by the time she found us. Worshipping her sounds like it would be a waste of time too, no?”

Nile was filled with questions, suddenly, a cacophony of dissonance in her mind. “I-- then--”

But then Joe was grinning at the doorway, where Nicky had appeared, and his attention was gone, redirected by Nicky’s gravity.

-

Andy took her out for pastries, dragging her through the kasbah with unerring steps like a hound following a fox, and then forcefully sat Nile on a table outside on a small square, the cafe behind them already heaving with people. It was early Autumn, but the weather was still glorious, a bit crisp and bright enough that Nile wished she’d brought sunglasses.

Nobody paid her much mind, and she had not quite gotten over the relief of it yet, being somewhere without having to be someone, just for a minute. She was just a person sitting at a cafe, waiting for her recently-mortal, millenia-old friend to come back with food.

Andy returned with a basketful of bread and croissants, and was shortly presented with an elegant pot of mint tea and a good old black coffee for Nile, who wasn’t sure yet about the other stuff. Andy ripped a croissant in half and shoved a handful in her mouth, and after the food had been swallowed, she looked less furious.

“How long could you go without eating, before?” Nile asked, watching the ever-present line between Andy’s eyebrows smooth out in relief.

“Until we died.”

“Okay, but… how long, really?”

“You can try it and find out, if you want.” Andy didn’t seem amused by the line of questioning, but Nile had something like urgency to know the answers now, before Andy couldn’t tell her anymore. “Joe’s pretty good at it, Nicky gets shitty after two days, and Booker-- ah, shit. He died on the Russian front, so he always hated it. Hates it.” Andy drank some tea and visibly calmed herself down. “So? How are you doing?”

“Oh my god, is this a performance review?”

Andy had a laugh like a knife, bright, sharp and almost always gone quickly. “If you want it to be, I guess.”

“I just-- keep thinking there’s something I’ve forgotten to ask, and I won’t have time for all of it.”

“Some might say you’ve got nothing but time, right now.”

“You don’t, though.”

Andy ate her third croissant with a scowl, seemingly masticating it along with her thoughts. Nile wondered what language she thought in, how she dreamed, and if her mind was closed to them all now, her gift revoked and their strange, shared dreams lost to her as well. It was a frightening thought, now that Nile had time to think about it. It was all, in its own way, frightening. They might die at any time, even the most invulnerable of them.

“Nile,” Andy said quietly. “If you keep treating me like I’m made of clay, I’m gonna snap your neck at some point.”

“Mhm. Won’t stick, though.”

Andy finally smiled at her. She had crumbs in her teeth, and a fan of fine, thin lines around her eyes Nile had never noticed before, and now couldn’t stop looking at. “Did you talk to Joe?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s better at the--” she waved a few fingers lazily by her head, encompassing a world of possible meanings. “--You know. The mind stuff than I am.”

“Not Nicky?”

“Nicky never stopped believing in his god,” Andy said, direct and sure and horrible with it, a blunt bow of a statement. “Joe actually thought about it.”

“You don’t think it’s the same god?”

Andy’s smirk looked a little pained, but even Nile could see she was trying. “You know what I think about calling it god.”

-

It did seem like they were in Tangier for a reason, but nobody had told her what it was yet.

Mostly, they just seemed to be hanging out with each other.

Nile came back from a walk one evening to find Andy wrapped in Nicky’s long, swordsman’s arms, her back to his chest and both of them sprawled sideways on the couch, listening to music.

“Where’s Joe?” Nile asked them, unsure how to interpret the way Andy’s face didn’t even tighten at her entrance, the music just loud enough to be the main feature of the room.

“At the movies,” Nicky said, simply. “They’re showing _Mon Oncle,_ he’ll be gone for hours.”

Absolutely none of that made sense to Nile, less so, even, than two people who had been friends for centuries listening to what sounded like the weirdest rock music she’d ever heard in a language she couldn't identify while nearly catatonic in the living room.

“Should I-- go?”

“He’ll probably end up at his favourite cafe, if it is still around, he likes to play cards,” Nicky mused, opening his eyes a bit, everything about him emanating patience. “Or he will be at the beach.”

“Great,” Nile said, aimlessly, and turned around and left again.

Nile couldn’t find the cafe without its name, and without a phone she couldn’t just look up directions. She had tossed her last one, something feeling like it was being torn from her in the progress. A clean break. That's what she'd hoped for.

It occurred to her that there was nothing to stop her from buying one. Nicky had handed her a wad of cash out of a Western Union on their first morning, distributing the same to everyone except himself, saying that all he wanted was good food and a nap, and then he’d met up with someone to collect their keys from whoever hung on to them when they weren’t around and had done exactly that, but in reverse order.

She bought a phone, an off-brand thing with a weird interface and slightly odd button placements, but it worked, and soon enough she’d found some wifi and looked up the way to the beach.

It was night by the time she made her way through the city to the seafront on foot, and the lights from the port stretched out over the nearly-still water of the strait. The sand was soft enough under her boots that she gave in to the urge to take them off, slinging them over her shoulder by the laces and picking her way down to the waterline barefoot. It was colder here than in the city itself, an intermittent breeze creeping down the back of her shirt, but she was hardly the only person out for a nighttime visit. Couples were strolling along the sand, and small groups with little bonfires were gathered together, laughing and talking.

She had never been able to travel like this before, even when she had been a Marine. On leave, she went home, and that was where she wanted to be. She had enjoyed training in other countries, meeting other people, starting to learn other languages, but never like this, taking an aimless wander along a pristine beach on a cool night.

She didn’t run into Joe, but she wasn’t really looking for him.

As it happened, he was still up when she got back, close to midnight, quietly cleaning the kitchen. She saw him toss a few bottles carefully into a bin, and sweep the remains of some crumbs off the counter before the kettle started whistling and he quickly whisked it off the heat. “Tea, Nile?”

“Sure. Are Nicky and Andy--”

“Asleep,” he said wryly. “Looks like I’m sharing with you tonight.”

“Oh. Does it-- is that okay with you?”

Joe looked amused as he poured hot water over fresh mint he’d gotten from somewhere, green scent filling the kitchen. “Only if it’s okay with you. If not, there’s a perfectly good couch.”

“No, it’s fine, I just meant, you know, I thought you two always…”

Nile trailed off because Joe was laughing at her. “I prefer it. But you gotta remember, we’ve known Andy for eight hundred years, almost. We have so little time left with her, you know? She’s always loved Nicolò. Sometimes people click.”

Nile felt dizzy at the thought of it, knowing you had at most forty or fifty years left with someone you’d known for that long. “Oh.”

“All things die,” Joe said. “Drink your tea.”

“How are you so--”

“Handsome? Good in bed?”

“Wouldn’t know about the second one.” Joe grinned at her, leaving his rejoinder unspoken. “No, I-- damn, I can’t even get a word out today. I don’t really know. I don’t know how you could be with one person for a thousand years, I guess. No matter who they are. I don’t know how you’d deal with the loss.”

Joe shrugged expansively, as though it were also a mystery to him, but one he had no intention of ever trying to solve. “Sometimes the will of God is unknowable.”

Nile had a moment of indecision in which she felt like two different people, pre-and-post-Nile, a Nile who had died and been resurrected several times already and a Nile who still feared death, the most human version of herself, the one who knew that God was watching her and had a fingerprint on her soul. “Andy said--”

“You’ve already told me what Andy said. You want to ask if I’m like you or like her, but you won’t like the answer.”

“Try me,” Nile said, not sure how to feel about being so preempted. “Grandpa.”

Joe laughed at her, pointing a finger around his teacup. “Great-great-Grandpa. Listen, Nile. I didn’t pray for a long time. Do you know why I started again? Because there comes a point, if you live long enough, when the possibility of God is no longer something you can discredit out of hand. Nicolò thinks it’s destiny. I think it’s something else, but for me, my life is a gift. He is a gift. So, there must be a giver, do you see? A gift can also be a challenge.”

“So you do believe?”

“I still don’t have an answer to that. Yes. No. In my own way. I believe in something bigger than myself, and sometimes I'm furious with it.” He regarded her, his expression obtuse. He usually had such an open face. “I told you you wouldn't like it. There is no yes or no, for me. It's more like-- a feeling. Experience.”

“It’s just-- Booker made it sound like I was a dead end, you know? The end of a world, kind of, like I’m-- stuck outside of time, instead of in it. How can God want that?”

“Barzakh,” Joe said. “I remember that feeling, too.”

“What?”

“It’s like-- limbo, just not quite. Nicky didn’t know what it was either, when I explained to him. It’s a place between death and resurrection, in some ways of thinking. That’s the best way I can describe it. A link between worlds.”

“How could he not have known what limbo was? Wasn’t he a priest?”

“Nicky was a knight of the cross. It’s not quite what I’d have called a priest, but-- Nile, you understand, I can’t-- explain this to you, either? Christianity has changed so much, it’s like trying to tell you about a colour you’ve never seen. My only advice to you would be, don’t waste your prayers. Don’t waste your words or your years. That’s all. If I choose to pray, how and why I do it is a choice I’m making for me, not for Andy or even Nicky.”

“I feel like I’m just trying out different versions of myself, sometimes. A lot of the time.”

“You will be. Shall we go to bed?”

-

Joe took Andy’s mattress.

It occurred to Nile that she had never seen him sleeping alone, and the sight of it was deeply odd, as though she was seeing him nude in some important way, his back to the wall and his body curled in, a parenthesis without a twin.

Nile wondered what it would be like to get in with him, but she decided it would have felt like wearing someone else’s skin, and couldn’t bring herself to ask.

-

Nile slept through Joe waking up, and when she finally stirred it was because Andy kicked something aside, cursing softly, and Nile opened her eyes to the sight of Andy shirtless and scowling, digging around in her bag for something. “MotherFUCK,” Andy said, under her breath, before she called over her shoulder to Nicky, who appeared soundlessly in the doorway, his habit of being places before someone called him still vaguely unsettling. “I need a shirt.”

Nicky took off the one he was wearing and gave it to her. “Breakfast?”

“Fuck breakfast,” Andy muttered. “Ugh, why is-- is this what it’s like every damn time?” She turned to Nile. “Tell me how a hangover feels.”

“Uh,” Nile offered, trying not to laugh. “Like someone’s put your head in a pressure cooker?”

“Fuck.” Andy pulled on Nicky’s shirt, plain grey, like most of his tops. It didn’t swamp her, somehow. “Someone kill me.”

Nile was the first to laugh, but Andy joined in.

Nicky shook his head gently and went to get a shirt, and distantly Nile heard Joe whistle, low and appreciative.

It was raining, which surprised Nile a bit. She wasn’t sure why, after she’d figured out what the sound on the roof was. It just didn’t seem right somehow that this sunny place should see a downpour at all, much less out of season like this, but it didn’t seem to faze anyone but Joe, who frowned out the window before he borrowed Nicky’s hoodie to go under his jacket and went out, looking younger all of a sudden with the addition of such an incongruous item of clothing.

“You won’t have any clothes left at this rate,” Nile said, when Nicky handed it over.

“I’ll borrow yours, maybe,” he said. “Would you like some eggs?”

Nile wasn’t the biggest fan of eggs, but protein sounded good after all the pastry and bread of the last couple days. The table wobbled when she bumped its legs, and both Andy and Nicky steadied it. Nile leaned on it with a bit more care, and took the plate Nicky offered her. “Why are we here?” she asked, looking out at the drenched street, laundry hastily pulled in and rivulets of water running down the small gutters beside the paving stones, winding away out of sight. “Is there a mission or something?”

“Of a kind,” Nicky said, but Andy spoke right over him. “Joe’s visiting his grandchildren.”

Nile completely forgot she had a mouthful, and only swallowed by reflex.

-

Andy left, and Nicky stayed.

Nile had completely forgotten about her cooling food after hacking down her last mouthful and now it was sitting in a sad, congealed lump on Nicky’s colourful plates, his own helping economically finished as though he didn’t see the need in wasting it.

Nile watched him eat, wondering if he was going to explain or just leave that hanging.

“They’re not his grandchildren,” Nicky said, when Nile couldn’t stop herself from gesturing incredulously at him. “More like… distant relatives. A long line of descendants.”

“But-- Booker said…”

“Booker said a lot of things,” Nicky said, kindly. “The thing about immortality is that it doesn’t ask you if you’re ready for it, or if you can handle what it will do to you. Yusuf was married, when it happened to us. He had children, too.”

That was so much to take in, Nile wasn’t even sure where to start. “I thought you guys were-- I guess it was different then.” Nile put her head in her hands, unable to keep looking at him. He was just watching her again, that unfathomably old look in his eyes. It didn’t help that he was smiling, half of his mouth lifted crookedly, as though everything she was saying was something he had heard before. “Descendants? After a thousand years?”

“You’re thinking about your family.”

“Yeah, you’re fucking right I am!”

“Nile. Look at me?”

Nile still didn’t want to, but he was always so patient, it felt childish to refuse. “I’m really mad, just so you know. He’s kept track of them for a thousand years and I can’t even tell them I’m not dead? How is that fair?”

“He hasn’t spoken to them. It’s too hard, you see? He looks. Sometimes, when there is something we can do, he helps, but he can’t touch. Would you wish that on yourself?”

“Why not? It’s better than nothing!”

“I don’t think so,” Nicky said peacefully. “But he disagrees.”

“So at least you guys fight about something,” Nile found herself uttering, before she caught herself, wondering if she was sounding like Booker now, or worse, if Booker had a point.

“We have disagreed many times,” Nicky said, a hint of something sad on his face. “But I never had a family, so it is not my decision to make for him.”

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

“Immensely. More so every year.”

Nile felt as though he’d thrown her a brick and she’d caught it full in the chest, a kicked-out pain which flared all across her ribcage as her breath hitched.

Before she knew it, he was hugging her, damn him, pulling her sideways as he took the chair next to her and held her close, letting the odd, soundless sobs crash through her. She’d never felt like this, furious and sad all at once, as though the new immortality of her body had given her a spectrum of emotion she had never glimpsed in herself until now. A new topography, unmapped.

“I wish I had better answers for you,” Nicky said, lips brushing the crown of her head. “Nile, I’m so sorry for the choices you will be making, now. I can’t tell you what to do, only what I think is right. And I’m only human, too. Just a different kind of human. We all are.”

“You let him put you in danger like this, for-- for hundreds of years, and you don’t understand why Booker did what he did?”

“Booker tried to stay with them,” Nicky pointed out. “He thought he might be able to share his life with them, but your life will only ever be yours. We don’t know why it is given to us, why us, why then, why ever? You will live in the mystery, and the mystery will become your friend, or you will also have to break.”

“I hate this.”

“We all have, at one point.”

“Even Joe?”

“Especially Joe.” Nicky stroked a hand down her back and let her go, leaving her to wipe her eyes with a bit more dignity. “You don’t understand what I was to him, when we met.”

“He told me, a little.”

“So you know, but you don't understand.”

“I'm still hoping someone will explain it.”

Nicky kept smiling at her, sitting next to her and ignoring the way she was rubbing her eyes, heels of her palms wet when she let them fall, and suddenly, while she was looking at him, something in his eyes began to remind her of Andy. “Then I think it should be Joe,” he said. “For me, it is still painful to think about.”

Andy had said to her, before the lab and before she'd almost left them all, and gone home, that it wasn't what time stole away that made it a torment, but what it left behind.

The rain was still running down the windows, panes of glass steaming up as their body heat filled the kitchen. “You're really not going to tell me?”

“Nile. I wasn't a person I'm proud of, when I was young.”

“The day I died, I killed someone. I’m not proud of it. I can live with it.”

“I have probably killed more people than you have met in your lifetime,” he said, and Nile had to run for the bathroom before she lost her breakfast in the sink.

-

Andy had a toothbrush in her mouth and foam dripping down her chin when Nile blasted past her, and then, when Nile was sitting up and wiping her lips with the back of her hand, Andy was still there, and started rubbing her back, small, circular motions, like someone would for a child, or someone very delicate. Nile batted her away, vaguely aware that she was shaking. “Don’t touch me. Do not touch me right now.”

“Okay,” Andy said, and stopped.

“Are you really gonna just sit there and pretend like it’s fine, what’s going on here?” Nile asked her, when the silence had persisted

“I had twins,” Andy said. “My sister raised them. I don’t remember their father’s name, or what they looked like. I’m from a time before portraits, Nile. Eventually, he’ll lose track, too. There’ll be another war, or a revolution, or a natural disaster. He knows that.”

“And what about Booker?”

“Booker couldn’t believe that they could ever hate him,” Andy said simply. “Everyone can hate. That’s what happened to Booker. He forgot they were human, and he forgot he was, too.”

“And you?”

“What about me? We’re talking about you.”

“No we’re not. Don’t give me that shit.”

Andy crouched down, a spot of toothpaste on Nicky’s appropriated shirt and her hair sticking up on one side, her eyes bloodshot from what Nile assumed was a lingering hangover, and then she kissed Nile full on the lips, tasting like mint and mouth and nobody Nile had ever kissed before.

Nile shoved her away, too startled and angry to do anything else. “What the fuck was that?”

“A reminder,” Andy said quietly. “Life goes on, and on, and on, and sometimes what you take from it is just what it throws at you. The same for you, and for Joe and Nicky, and--”

“And Quynh?”

“Yeah,” Andy rasped. “And Quynh. And Booker, too.”

“I want to go home,” Nile said. “I want to protect them.”

“You can’t do both.” Andy was so close to her, breath a warm, minted blow against Nile’s face.

“Yeah? Did you say the same thing to Joe?”

“Of course I did. And he’s kept track of a line of descent which might not even be his anymore, and watched them be displaced, and subjugated, and forced to adapt, and sometimes, when he can, he helps these people because that’s what humanity means to him. And half of them would have called him a lover of evil for it, and the other half would have asked for things he can’t give them.”

“Did you try and stay?” Nile asked her, staring right into Andy’s eyes, hoping maybe she would be able to see something in them she had no name for.

“I was a queen,” Andy said. “Of course I did.”

“And they worshipped you like a god?”

“Yeah,” Andy said again. “And you can see how well that worked out, huh?”

Someone knocked on the bathroom door, and when Nile looked over her shoulder she already knew it would be Nicky.

“Nile. Are you okay?”

“Not really,” Nile bit out. “Are you?”

Nicky glanced at Andy, and Nile didn't need him to answer that particular question.

-

Joe came back after the rain had stopped.

He disappeared into the bedroom he shared with Nicky without a word, and Nicky followed him in, leaving Nile to Andy's silence.

She couldn't imagine sleeping next to her tonight, but there was nowhere else to go in the apartment except the living room.

She slept on the couch, after a restless, itchy walk, in which every corner of Tangier she had discovered suddenly felt like Mars.

In the morning, Joe woke her up, and Nile rose out of a dream which clung to her like an oil slick. He sat down on the floor next to the couch, looking so-- so goddamn normal, to Nile, who wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean anymore. He had stopped aging at a point in his life when lines had begun to crowd together in the creases of his face, but Nile had no idea how old he had been at the time, or what it meant to him to have seen his own face stay eternal when everything changed around him. She had thought-- she had thought. She had assumed that Joe’s rage at Booker’s betrayal was obvious, and straightforward, the way Joe could be when he wanted someone to know something they didn’t, or when he was annoyed, which was less frequent than she’d first thought, when she met him.

“You almost did what Booker did? Once?”

“Betrayal? Never.”

“No, I mean. The other part. The-- wanting to be dead. Looking for ways.”

Joe shook his head, extending a hand towards her as though she were ready to spook, or to strike him for the incursion. She didn’t do either, letting him take hold of hers, gathering them together. “No. I learned to love my enemy, instead, because he was the only one who knew me, inside and out, blood and guts and tears and failures. Because he was as kind as he was terrible, and those two things were not as far apart as I’d thought they were. What Booker did was try to take from us something he hasn’t understood yet, and can’t imagine cherishing. You don’t have to untether yourself from the world, Nile. You just have to learn that it will never be kind to you quite the way you want it to, or when you’re hoping it will. Sometimes, it drops an invader in your lap and says: “here is your soul.” Sometimes it kills your children and says: “your time is not their time.” Sometimes you see them flourish from a distance and know you might see triumph or disaster or just… a regular life, with all its regular pain. Sometimes you end up with another kind of family, but it’s up to you how you love them. It always is.”

“You’re saying that like… like you can just turn it on and off.”

“When we met,” Joe said, a tiny smile creeping over his face, “Nicolò gutted me like a fish, and didn’t even look back at what he’d done. Believe me when I say, you can’t turn it on at will.”

“I wish someone would tell me that story,” Nile managed, trying not to imagine it and failing, though the faces of the figures in her mind were not Joe and Nicky, but shapes without names. “You make it sound romantic.”

Joe’s smile widened. “It really wasn’t. I did like the sword, though. Don’t tell him I said that, will you?”

Against her will, Nile laughed. They were so… old, all of them. Experienced enough to know what would break tension, what would divert a conversation, what would take the strain off something, but they were also the people she had, now. Ride and die, and die again, and keep a finger on the pulse of humanity too, if they were lucky. “Are you ever gonna tell me what happened?”

“Yes. Nicky already asked me to.”

And there it was, bare in the air between them. They would always be like this, she thought. They would always be concentric to each other, all of them, in some way, and that meant her, too. “I'm really trying to understand.”

“I know you are. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth telling.”

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Tumblr [here!](https://formerlyfebricant.tumblr.com)


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